Operation Kirk O' Field
by Right What Is Wrong
Summary: With Dumbledore dead and no leads on the Horcruxes, Harry takes early action. Oneshot.


" _Dinner, Nagini," said Voldemort softly, and the great snake swayed and slithered from his shoulders onto the polished wood._

Harry awoke abruptly and rolled over to throw up into the basin by the side of his bed. The lingering taste of human flesh always did that to him.

His eyes still watering as he retched, he grabbed his Dumbledore's Army Galleon and tapped it twice. Immediately, a _crack_ sounded through the air, and Dobby saluted him smartly, his honorary coin dangling from a ribbon around his neck like a medal. "Is it time for Operation Kirk O' Field, Harry Potter sir?" he asked eagerly.

Harry swallowed back bile. "They're all there - get them quick," he choked out, and Dobby nodded and vanished with another _crack_.

* * *

Dobby jumped into the Malfoy Manor dungeons and found several half-conscious prisoners, some clearly magical and some clearly Muggle, children and adults alike. He freed them and jumped with them to a safe location, and came back carrying vast quantities of Muggle explosives.

Then he brought a few more loads. It was truly amazing what the combined Potter and Black inheritances could buy, especially when one resorted to seedier markets.

With the dungeons packed to bursting with explosives, he set the timer and jumped out. It was a true pity he couldn't stay around to watch. After all those years of the bad master...

Dobby supposed brightly that he could survey the wreckage afterwards and use his imagination.

* * *

The crater formerly known as Malfoy Manor was filled with bewildered ghosts, as usual for incidents in which a large number of people had died without any warning. Not having realized they were dead, they swarmed the group that appeared with a _crack_ and flailed at them with all the vehemence they could muster.

"Lovely seeing you too, sister mine," Andromeda Tonks said dryly as Bellatrix's ghost screamed in her face.

"Mum, he's over here," her daughter called, approaching a blackened lump that was still moving - and, more miraculously, intact - alongside a much thinner, longer blackened lump that was also still twitching. "Bloody Hell, Harry wasn't joking about him being resilient."

"Excellent!" barked old Mad-Eye. "Spirits are much harder to contain than physical bodies." He lumbered over, then kicked the feebly stirring lump with his peg leg. "That's for my real leg, you bastard!"

"Not for your fallen comrades, Alastor?" Andromeda asked as she came up alongside him, both her sisters' ghosts now howling at her, and began putting bindings on what remained of the sorcerer and his snake. Underestimating even a fallen Dark Lord would be a good way to join Narcissa and Bellatrix.

"The Ministry hasn't re-authorized the Unforgivables yet," Moody growled. "If I took revenge for them, I'd have to haul myself into Azkaban." He kicked the charred lump again. "No law against this, though. My only regret is that he's too sensitive a prisoner to drag him out in public and let everyone have a go at him."

* * *

And thus fell the Dark Lord, who never rose again: the remaining Horcruxes were gradually hunted down, and Harry celebrated the birth of his first child by finally putting Tom Riddle out of his misery.

With the flower of the Pureblood aristocracy extinguished in a mysterious conflagration (the insurance goblins were bemused by the lack of magical residue at the scene), new witches and wizards rose to fill the power vacuum, and

the Wizarding world began the arduous process of reform. While some lower-level Voldemort sympathizers still lived - a certain toad-like woman among them - they soon found their lifestyles curtailed without high-level allies there to protect them from the consequences of their actions. Some curbed their impulses and retained their posts. Others did not: the toad-like woman, for instance, was soon fired from her position for corruption and cruelty to her subordinates, then arrested and Kissed a few years later after she was discovered with a mutilated Muggle teenager chained up in her basement, with the bones of several more buried in her backyard. Her Veritaserum testimony linked her to cold cases going back decades; reportedly Auror Captain Harry Potter was disgusted but unsurprised at the revelation that her very most favorite victims were dark-haired teenage boys.

She was an extreme case, but many of those thus fired eventually came up on lesser charges. It was almost as though rampant bigotry coupled with an utter assurance that crimes against one's "inferiors" would go unpunished bred criminal activity...

All was not well, and would not be for many years to come: the rot went so deep in the Wizarding world that it would take generations to stamp out. But it was getting better.

Old Albus Dumbledore would never have imagined that the power the Dark Lord knew not was a vengeful House-Elf.

* * *

 **Author's Note** : As far as Harry knew, Snape was guilty as sin, and Draco was an attempted murderer who had avoided killing anyone through sheer dumb luck. Narcissa's the only mentioned non-combatant, and she's the wife, mother, and sister of Death Eaters - she may not be Marked, but he has every reason to believe she's not far from it.

It may not pass the "What Would Dumbledore Do?" test, but Harry was rather sick of being an uninvited guest to meetings centering around kidnapping, torture, and murder, and whom to kidnap, torture, and murder next. (The use of explosives is rather cliched, I admit, but Moody going out in a blaze of Fiendfyre might have given Death Eaters time to Apparate or Portkey out.)

I feel the need to emphasize I do not support regime change via high explosives in real life, but the Wizarding world is a peculiar case.

Kirk O' Field was the residence at which conspirators attempted to assassinate the debauched Lord Darnley, husband of Mary Stuart (better known as Mary, Queen of Scots), by packing the basement with gunpowder and setting it alight. The attempt didn't quite go off as planned, with Darnley somehow getting wind of the plot and managing to clear the blast radius before the explosion, but he was soon dispatched anyway. Fortunately for our conspirators, the energy density of high explosives has increased since then.


End file.
